Daily Archives: 1 March 2016

To me it means simply that if the American people who bother to vote in primary elections and caucuses choose him before other candidates, he should be the nominee. In the end, it has nothing to do with my preferences.

In most instances, if the President was selected on the criterion of personal preference, there would be, as there has been in totalitarian countries historically, only one nominee, and voting would be pro forma, when it isn’t—as well—mandatory (it was Donald Trump, incidentally, who pointed out recently that he is not sure he is for the health care “mandate” as it would mean that having insurance would be mandatory—he can be faulted for many things, but a very small kudo to him for his sensitivity to the language as the general populace should understand it). I get the impression, especially when paying heed to the most vociferous of Hillary Clinton opponents, who are not necessarily feeling the Bern, which seems to aggravate the effects of the Hill venom, or the most ardent of Tea Party endorsers, that this is precisely what they would prefer. And that preference for one candidate, one vote, clearly is heedless of the meaning of that foundation of the system of government called democracy.

Personally I would naturally be most comfortable, which means in my case that I would be most free of anxiety and worry, if the person I thought most appropriate for the office of President of the United States were simply appointed to office. However, I find myself questioning the intent of anyone who becomes a drummer for a candidate, and closes himself or herself off from even the simple request that “enough is enough” already, and to let the cards play as the players see fit to bid or bet on them.

There is no lack of passionate intensity among the acolytes and partisans of any one candidate. All have at least some.

In the social media, arguments fly like bees sensing pollen in the next field over swollen with herbage, but disoriented by the nerve toxins in the herbicides that abound invisibly in the air. No matter the candidate, commentators with the deliberate mien of their sagacity or merely outrageous in their certitude find platforms and are quoted ad nauseam in the feeds of the broadcast media, the ones that measure their subscribers in the hundreds of millions. Where individuals measure their self-worth on the volume of their followers or their connected relations with others, all of whom are “friends.” Permission to believe is found, refreshed daily, in virtual venues with names like Alternews and USUncut. The channels of information are chock full of truth, unsluiced because of the freedom of speech, all speech, any speech.

The bottom line for me, more than ever, and all thanks to the general air of mass hysteria that has taken over the land of netizens and tv watchers, is that this is a democracy. Every citizen is entitled to his or her vote. Everyone is entitled to his or her preferences.

In an odd sort of way, and I can imagine whatever I may about what is really going on the heads of people I don’t know in the least, but in the end I still have no idea, they accept with perfect equanimity my views. My views, which when we get down to cases (or at least I do in those occasional bouts of honesty I impose upon myself), are fairly predictable for my socio-economic set and background and my history as a resident of the rabidly liberal northeast corridor localized in eastern Massachusetts and particularly in that citadel of progressive mania, Cambridge, home of Harvard and MIT, and one of the biggest bubbles on the continent.

I am well-off, and socially minded. I am highly educated and likely in a tiny minority at the upper reaches of some scale of measurable intellectual capacity. I believe in reason more than I believe in faith. I believe in that which is called Natural Law, more than I believe in the possibility of being saved personally. I believe humans should live ethically, and that ethics are, in a sense, not so much a solipsism as self-evident and derivative of natural law.

I believe we are not so much an accident on the planet as the result of perfectly deducible sets of determinable, but hardly determinative combinations and recombinations of organic molecules and genetic signalling. And I believe we are as likely to evolve into some other life forms in the fullness of time, as likely as it would have been to anticipate that we would make an appearance on the planet’s surface in the fullness of time were we to go back far enough prior to our emergence on the stage of the grand selective lottery.

And I believe that Donald Trump has the same potential inevitability as any other candidate who, by accident or design, for a lark or for some nefarious purpose unknown even to himself or herself, who, for all we know, had no motive for running that he or she is at all aware of consciously. Indeed, in the case of Donald Trump, I believe it’s possible he, in bare acuality, has not an idea or even an atom of a kernel of a concept as to what makes him do anything. And all that being said, is to say not very much more than we can say about any of his supporters. And as for other candidates and their supporters, I’m not sure that because we can delineate a cogent argument that seems to posit in a thesis and at once to constitute a proof as to its coherency as logic, that such arguments, in a democracy, are worth any more than a feeling deep in one’s heart that the other guy or gal is the right one, not when the curtains close behind the voter in the ballot booth.

I believe there are far fewer chips than one would infer from the aggregate energy of all the handwringing arguments and all the casuistry, all the passionate invective, all the frustrated anguish and all the anger. The country is young, but still old enough to have gone through this closing in on half a hundred times over our history that began in a period set three centuries ago, when life was profoundly different in terms of the nature of the quotidian and the sophistication and leverage provided by the prevailing technologies of the time. We will still elect a president and what chips there are, however many there are, will fall where they may, as they always have fallen.

Fact is, the country was founded, in terms of principles of the structure of government with a sharply divided, largely dualistic and dueling set of theories. We are still divided, though along different lines. We shed blood periodically as parties on either side of whatever divide defines our present epoch—and as it has repeatedly in all previously discernible epochs. And perhaps, there will be blood. Yet again.

But, despite the dire sense of both sides that there is some Manichean division that with victory for one side of the other will mean that white will prevail over black, or black over white, or red over blue, or vice versa, or, using whatever semiotic figures you like, that there will be a prevailing order—even though there is none now, and has not been for some time, if ever, perhaps even when we separated ourselves from England and struck out into the world, no longer a colony, for sure, but a sovereign nation, which we remain—and that the other side will lose, our side or theirs no matter. As if the outcome will mean the extinction of roughly half the populace of a profoundly large country with not a small number of citizens, with no clear majority holding an unequivocally clear position standing on undisputed ground.

We live in a time of political paralysis, of stymied hopes, of dashed plans, and unbalanced forces pitted increasingly against one another. We’ve lived in such a time before. Before we always suffered the torment of the irresolution that follows when the great engine of compromise, which assures that progress will occur, however slowly and incrementally—or we would not be where we are now, which is no longer, and mainly for good and not for ill, were that engine not in a state of ready revival as it has always proven to be. We are poised on a tipping point, as it has become stylish to call it, though I mean it in a much more mundane and less precipitous, hence less dramatic, sense. Once we tip into that necessary realm of painstaking—in few other contexts does the word assume literal meaning so forcefully—compromise. It will happen as it has always happened. It even happened under the “impossible” circumstances of most of the tenure of President Obama. It will happen, or not, of course, under a President Trump, or a President Clinton. And it will likely be no less difficult than it would be under a Rubio or a Sanders.

Here are the bare facts, at least insofar as they pertain to me. This I know for sure. If you feel you are in a different position, and there’s reason to think that attaining such a position is possible through a duplicable process, you have a responsibility to share the algorithm, as they say. But for now, I manage to live, more and more readily each day, knowing that there is not a thing I can do, not a word I can say, and not a dollar I can spend that will alter the selection of delegates to represent this or that candidate come convention time in any state in which I am not a resident. I could not alter the outcome in South Carolina for either party in South Carolina, no matter how much I might have wanted to, which was not at all. Any more than I can do so in the thirteen states (and one territory) of Super Tuesday casting their ballots even as I sit here typing.

It must be enough to accept that however you vote, whatever your reasons for doing so, it will have an impact on the outcome, however infinitesmal that impact, though it will not measurably change the outcome that results from all the votes of all the voters, on whom you can have no impact whatsoever. I get no solace knowing that whatever the range of emotions that rise within me—usually uncontrollably, as I’d just as soon pay no attention whatsoever to this race or to any of the candidates, and even less so to their supporters (who are the agents of encouragement to behave in such provocative or egregious or predictable ways)—they will not determine who is President on January 20, 2017. The great test is not accepting the panoply of feelings that are inevitable, and good or bad, from hearing the results on election day this November. The great test is merely accepting the result. It is part of the experience of being a citizen. And if that isn’t a conscious choice, given the state of affairs as they have been, not for the past ten months, or even ten years, but likely for your entire life, you have no reason to complain at all. It certainly won’t matter to President Trump, if that’s who we get.

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